OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 197 



has been at the pains of obtaining a transhition of the paper by a lady, 

 I shall adopt that with a few trifling changes. 



" When a man of order prepares to depart on a long journey, he 

 arranges his affairs, and is careful to discharge all the debts he may 

 have contracted. This is why I am going to tell you how, some fifty 

 years ago, one of our scientists, the most distinguished, received and 

 encouraged a young debutant who had come to show hira his first 

 attempts. 



'• This young debutant was myself, with your leave. Notice, to 

 excuse the epithet, that this goes back to the month Brumaire of the 

 year VIII. of the French republic, first edition.* Some months later, 

 they did me the signal honor of electing me an associate of the Na- 

 tional Institute ; but at that date, and especially at the little earlier 

 period when my story begins, I found myself completely unknown. 

 I was then quite a small professor of mathematics in the Central 

 School of Beauvais. Having recently left the Polytechnic School, I 

 had much zeal and less science. At that time, little was demanded 

 of young men but zeal. I was impassioned for geometry and many 

 other things. Fortune rather than reason saved me from yielding to 

 tastes too diverse. Bound from that time by the sweetest ties to the 

 interior of the family which had adopted me, happy in the present and 

 counting on the future, I only thought of following with delight the 

 bent of my mind towards all kinds of scientific studies, and of doing for 

 pleasure what the interest of my career would have prescribed to me 

 as a duty. I had, above all, an unbounded ambition to penetrate into 

 the high regions of mathematics, where men discover the laws of the 

 universe. But these grand theories, still scattered in the collections 

 of academies, were almost unapproachable, except to a^mall number 

 of superior men who had co-operated in establishing them ; and to 

 launch into them without a guide over their footsteps, this would be 

 an enterprise in which one would ha.ve every chance of wandering for 

 a long time before rejoining them. I knew that Laplace had labored 

 in unifying this magnificent ensemble of discoveries in the work which 

 he has very justly called the Mecanique Celeste. The first volume 

 was in press ; the others would follow, at long intervals, agreeably t^i 

 my desires. A step which might appear very hazardous opened to 

 luO a privileged entrance into this sanctuary of genius. I ventured 

 10 write directly to the illustrious author, and beg him to permit his 



* Brumaire began in 1799 on October 2.3: Biot was then twenty-five jears 



oM. 



